This is a series of wisdom and mystical knowledge that will be examined... This knowledge will show the hidden teachings of Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef also known as Jesus the Christ but will also include esoteric knowledge from the Mystics of all religions and philosophies...
All of these Mystics will ask you to find the ' Source of All ', and to ' Know Thyself '... Enter into the most important experience of your life...

With awakening there also comes a total reorganization of the way we perceive life—or at least the beginning of a reorganization. This is because awakening itself, while beautiful and amazing, often brings with it a sense of disorientation. Even though you as the One have awakened, there is still your whole human structure—your body, your mind, and your personality. Awakening can often be experienced as very disorienting to this human structure.

So it is the process that happens after awakening that I want to explore. As I’ve said, for a very few people, the moment of awakening will be complete. It will be final in a certain sense, and there will be no need for a continuing process. We might say that such people had an extraordinarily light karmic load; even though they may have experienced extreme suffering before awakening, one can see that their karmic inheritance, the conditioning that they were dealing with, wasn’t too deep. This is very rare. Only a few people in a given generation may wake up in such a way that there’s no further process to undergo.

What I always tell people is this: don’t count on that person being you. Better to count on being like everyone else, which means that you will undergo a process after an initial awakening. It won’t be the end of your journey. What I will attempt to do here is to point you in a direction that may be useful and orienting as you embark on that journey. As my teacher used to say, it’s like getting your foot in the front door. Just because you’ve gotten your foot in the front door doesn’t mean you have turned the lights on; it doesn’t mean you have learned to navigate in that different world that you’ve awakened to.

I’m very happy that this book, which is based on a series of talks I’ve given, offers me the opportunity to address this subject—the question of what happens after awakening. The information that exists on life after awakening is not usually made public. It’s most often shared only between spiritual teachers and their students. The problem with that approach is that, as I’ve said, a lot of people are now having these moments of awakening, and there is very little coherent teaching available for them. In that sense, this book is meant to be a welcoming to that new world, that new state of oneness. At this point I’d like to address those readers who are thinking, “Well, I haven’t had one of those glimpses. I don’t think I’ve really awakened.” Others may not be sure if what they have experienced is awakening or not.

Wherever you are on this path, I believe this information is relevant. For, as it turns out, what happens after awakening is relevant to what happens before awakening. In fact, the spiritual process isn’t any different before awakening than afterward. It’s just that, after awakening, the process is happening from a different perspective; you may think of it as a bird’s-eye view versus a ground-level view. Before awakening, we don’t know who we are. We think we are a separate, isolated person, in a particular body, walking around in a world that is distinct from us.

Once awakening has happened, we are still walking around in that world; we just know that we are not limited to a particular body or personality and that we are actually not separate from the world around us. It’s important to note, as well, that we do not become immune to misperception simply because we’ve had a glimpse of awakening. Certain fixations and conditionings will linger even after we perceive from the place of oneness.

The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations—our hang-ups, you might say. So it’s not that much different from the path to awakening, which is path of dissolving certain delusions we have, certain tendencies to contract. The difference is that, before awakening, our personality structure feels much weightier, much heavier, much denser, because our whole identity is actually wrapped up in our conditioning.

After awakening we know that the conditioning of our body-mind system is not personal; we know that it doesn’t define us. That knowledge, that living truth, makes it much easier and much less threatening to address the unraveling of our illusions. So there is a great similarity in what we’re doing spiritually before awakening and what we are doing afterward. We are doing it from a different perspective;

before awakening we are doing it from the perspective of separation, and after awakening we are doing it from the perspective of nonseparation. But what we’re actually doing, the approach, the process itself, is quite similar. You might say that it’s just happening on different levels of being. In that way, almost everything I’ll be discussing in the chapters that follow can be applied to wherever you find yourself; it can be translated to your own experience.

"Having been on death row for over thirty years, I have had to deal with major issues of anger, self-worth, and forgiveness. I can truthfully say that my Buddhist practice has transformed me from being a drug and alcohol addict to being more human. I have had to learn to accept my fate. I saw how much I had hurt so many people and I came to the realization that no matter what I did to get here, I knew I was never going to get out of prison alive. So I had to make the best of a very bad situation.

My transformation started with reading The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. At first I did not understand Milarepa’s devotion to his guru, Marpa. How could someone be so devoted? After Venerable Robina Courtin of Liberation Prison Project first visited us in 1997 and said in one of her talks, “You have to do the work, no one else will do it for you,” it really struck home. I literally had to take my life apart and rebuild it to see who I am. I had no one left to face except myself.

Robina helped me to prepare to take the Bodhisattva vows, the precepts. (These vows are the foundation of the Mahayana Buddhist path: they help you to commit yourself to the activities and life of a bodhisattva, an enlightened person.) During this time, I not only committed them to memory, but also practiced living according to them and devoting my every action to benefiting other living beings. My practice gave me insights into how people think and react to different situations and problems.

Once I accepted this new space of being, a whole new world began to open up and I was amazed at how I missed it in the first place. My life in here is now spent helping others, even at great criticism from fellow inmates. Over the years I have made many crafts for friends and family. I have written to numerous troubled people and have helped the sick and the dying here on death row. I do not do this for praise or to be recognized for it. I do it because I can.

This is the way it is. I created all this mess. I don’t have anyone else to blame. My practice has helped me make the best of an awful situation. That’s the reality. I have to own up to it and face it daily. Once I began to do this, my anger gradually lessened, as I knew it was all up to me. My family and I are now closer. My mother’s mind is more at ease. I put myself here; no one else can be blamed. The burden should not be placed on my family. I have to carry it. Only when you can really see the harm that you have done to yourself and stop blaming everyone else for all your problems can you see the avalanche of heartache you have caused others. No one will ever know how sorry I am. It still really hurts my heart after all these years.

And whatever awaits me in the next life, I will accept it as well. I don’t fear death. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, “When you realize emptiness, there is no fear.”

Question: You are Bhagavan. So you should know
when I shall get jnana. Tell me when I shall be a
jnani?

Sri Ramana Maharshi : If I am Bhagavan there is no
one besides the Self- therefore no jnani or ajnani. If
otherwise, I am as good as you are and know as
much as yourself. Either way I cannot answer your
question.

Coming here some people do not ask about
themselves. They ask: ‘Does the jivan muktas see
the world? Is he affected by Karma? What is
liberation after being disembodied or while alive in
the body?

Should the body of the sage resolve
itself in light or disappear from view in any other
manner? Can he be liberated though the body is left
behind as a corpse?

Their questions are endless. Why worry oneself in
so many ways? Does liberation consist in knowing
these things?
Therefore I say to them, leave liberation alone. Is
there bondage? Know this. See yourself first and
foremost.

SB: Could you say a little more about the difference between mystical experiences and true awakening?

Adyashanti: When the personal “I” merges and becomes one with everything, that’s a mystical experience. Or your consciousness expands infinitely, or your kundalini [innate spiritual energy] awakens, or you have a vision of the Buddha or Mother Mary, or you feel totally blissed out and peaceful. Even an ongoing experience of being unified with God or Buddha is just another mystical experience.

But even though they’re the highest, most beautiful states a human being can have, mystical experiences are happening to the dream character you take to be “me” – and this “me” is the one you wake up from. Awakening is the realization that you are the awakeness or lucidity that’s experiencing every moment of the dream, including the so-called spiritual or mystical, without being caught by it. As I said before, awakeness is not an experience, it’s a fact, whereas a mystical experience happens to someone at a particular place and time.

Another way I like to put it is, you’re not the personality or mask, you’re the one that’s always peering through the mask, always awake to every moment of your life without being identified with it. At the same time, you feel deeply intimate with the dream because the dream is known to be an expression of the awakeness itself. At first, of course, the dream may seem to be different from the awakeness.

But when awakening completes itself, the awakeness sees that everything that’s perceivable, including this human body, mind, and personality, is an expression of itself. The realization is completely nondual. As the Heart Sutra puts it, form is emptiness, emptiness is form."

"Beware of becoming delimited by a specific knotting and disbelieving in everything else, lest great good escape you.... Be in yourself a matter for the forms of all beliefs, for God is wider and more tremendous than that He should be constricted by one knotting rather than another."

Muhyi-al-Din ibn al-'Arabi
Bezels of Wisdom, 113

"He who counsels his own soul should investigate, during his life in this world, all doctrines concerning God. He should learn from whence each possessor of a doctrine affirms the validity of his doctrine. Once its validity has been affirmed for him in the specific mode in which it is correct for him who holds it, then he should support it in the case of him who believes in it."

The moment the Mind of Clear Light reveals itself as current consciousness, a unique wisdom is immediately present. It's hard to say which comes first. In any event, we call that wisdom "rigpa" in Tibetan or gnosis.

Our ordinary deluded state of mind is the Mind of Clear Light in a contracted state called "sem" in Tibetan. By relaxing into one's own natural "empty awareness", the contraction releases. It's the "empty awareness" aspect that never contracted and always remains as the changeless host of experience.

Studying, thinking, conceptualizing, doing practices with intent or making any mental efforts; increases the contraction.

So by relaxing as "empty awareness", the awareness that knows and observes, without any mental topics, goal orientation or efforts, the contraction releases and rigpa wisdom appears spontaneously and naturally.

The personal self is part of the contraction and disappears automatically as relaxation deepens. What remains is the impersonal Dharmakaya nirvana.

This is like letting a jar of swirling muddy water (thoughts) settle by leaving it alone. The water clears to crystal clarity all by itself. Doing anything to the jar (mind) keeps the mud swirling.

Even the personal "self" that seemed to be directing and managing the action of "letting the body and mind relax", disappears as it was itself the heart of the contraction.

The doctrine of Advaita is after all a conception existing in a human head, for it had to take shape in that head, even if it had been revealed by the god Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma as Indian myth and legend would have us believe.

Even if the doctrine were revealed in the deepest mystic experience by the discoverer digging within himself, it still remains a mental concept interpreted and formulated by the discoverer himself.

At the end of his long life of selfless teaching, the Buddha said that you must strive on the path yourself—the Awakened Ones only point the way.

Like the Buddha, all genuine mystics will tell you that the ultimate authority and touchstone of truth is not any scriptures or dogmas or teachers, but your own deepest experience.

“Don’t take my word for it,” they will say, “find out for yourself!” Just as a scientist tests hypotheses using experiments, so you should test the teachings in the laboratory of your life using spiritual practices.

It makes sense that you should be your own ultimate authority, because it is your own true nature that you must discover and know. As the oracle at Delphi commands: “know thyself.” And as Jesus instructs: “examine yourself, and learn who you are, how you exist, and what will become of you” (Jesus, Book of Thomas).

The reason the genuine mystic directs your attention inward to seek your own true nature is because, as Jesus says, “He who has not known himself does not know anything, but he who has known himself has also known the depth of all” (Jesus, Book of Thomas). And Rumi tells you: “It’s you yourself that hide your own treasure” (Rumi, Mathnawi). So the genuine mystic will always point you to yourself, to discover the depths of your own true nature.

The mystical injunction to know yourself and look to yourself as your own ultimate authority, however, does not mean that teachers and teachings have no value in the mystical path. The point is that they only show the way, as the Buddha says.

If you invest a particular teaching or teacher with ultimate truth, you will be implicitly separating yourself from the truth, and you will fail to realize the truth of your own nature. In the end, however, when you realize that the teachings and teachers—and indeed the entire world—is not separate from you, then you will see that your entire life is the truth of your own deepest being revealing itself to itself. Thus, to see truth in nothing reveals the truth in everything...

We are All One! That is easy to say but very difficult for you to accept and understand because in your illusory world all seem separate. Your modern physicists have finally discovered and accepted that absolutely everything is connected to everything else that you can see in the observable universe. And yet in your daily lives you live constantly with an intensely strong sense of separation because you are surrounded by individual impenetrable or non-integrated forms, forms that resist coalescence, unlike the air that you breathe and the water that you drink that easily and constantly flow and intermix. Sometimes in powerfully loving relationships there is a strong sense of oneness, but nevertheless you still occupy individual bodies. It is indeed very confusing.

Here in the spiritual realms, from which you truly are not separated, we mingle and mix with one another easily to exchange ideas or to share our love for each other, and when we choose to differentiate ourselves for whatever reason we just flow apart. But we are never separated from each other, our eternal state is at One with God, the Supreme Creator in Whom all exist, and, therefore, with each other. You have all chosen to experience separation, and until you change that choice, that is what you will experience.

Why would you continue to choose separation when it leaves you feeling alone, abandoned, and without love? It is because the illusion has become so real for you, a place in which billions of individuals appear to be constantly struggling for physical survival and because you identify utterly and completely with your bodies which always seem to be under some kind of physical or emotional threat. But bodies are just vehicles of limitation that you built and have chosen to occupy. You can choose to remove those limitations and experience a sense of vastness, of completeness, and of Oneness with All That Exists. But you have become so accustomed to limitations that you fear to live without them.

Your whole way of human life is based on a very powerful belief in limitation!

However, by going within to your quiet and holy inner sanctuary you can experience the vastness that is God, Creation, Love, and, therefore, You! To do so you need surrender to the divine flame of Love burning constantly within you, to let go of your beliefs, whatever they may be because they are very effective illusory distractions, and open your hearts so that the Love within can embrace you and demonstrate to you that you are as vast as all of Creation, as vast as God, and eternally embraced by the Love that is Reality. To fully experience that state would instantly destroy your physical form, your human body, because the energy of that state is infinitely powerful. Nevertheless you can experience a sense of that divine state, your natural state, that will permanently banish all your doubts about your Oneness with God.

You are on Earth to go through the awakening process and to assist others to do so. To awaken is a choice that only you can make, and in truth all living entities have already made the choice to do so, but you have not yet chosen when to do so. That choice of timing can, naturally, only be made in the eternal now moment, and when that happens you will awaken. Presently, those of you reading or listening to this message know this, but you are patiently biding your time as you assist others to make that same choice. You may feel that you have no choice, that you are waiting for some future divine event to wake you up, but in truth you always have the freedom to choose, and the moment of that choosing is drawing ever closer.

It is a confusing paradox to be experiencing life as a human within the space/time envelope while at the same time knowing that space and time are unreal. That is why it is essential that you go within daily to connect with the Love that resides there. That safe inner sanctuary is the doorway through which you enter Reality, the divine realms in which utter joy is eternally experienced.

Often, when you go within, your mind fills with distracting thoughts – all the shoulds, anxieties, and “must dos” that daily life as a human seems to demand of you. This is merely your egos attempting to draw you out from that place of divine peace and back into the illusion. Just acknowledge those ego thoughts, acknowledge that they are distracting you from your place of peace, but do not engage with them. If you do get drawn in, as often happens, when you realize this just intend to return to that place of inner peace without any judgment of the fact that you were distracted. Distractions are an essential aspect of the illusion that you built and initially it is difficult to disassociate yourselves from them for more than a few moments.

Reciting mantras, focusing on a candle or on your breath, or playing quiet music intended to assist you get into a meditative state can be helpful. But everyone of you are different and respond differently to the various methods that can assist you to reach inner peace in meditation, and of course there is no requirement that insists that you use a prescribed method for meditation. Do what feels right and comfortable for you, and practice that for a few weeks to give yourselves time to adjust to your new routine. Changing routines in an effort to find one that works better for you can be self-defeating, as it may well be your ego's attempts to keep you distracted. Relax, allow, and as thoughts or distractions arise do not engage with them. However, when you do and become aware, just set the intent to return to quietness, and realize that there is no such thing as failure.

Meditation is a practice to enable you to connect with your true Self, the Self that is One with God. Concert pianists spend long periods of time daily practicing to maintain their professional competence, so do not be surprised at the amount of practice that you have to put into meditation to find the peace and stillness that you seek. Do not judge yourselves as successful or unsuccessful and do not seek to see yourselves making progress because that is just further distraction. Just set a regular time and place for your practice, and when the time you have allowed is over go back to your daily living. If you maintain your practice without expectations you will find peace and contentment.

Metaphysics is ordinarily concerned with the criticism of superficial views about the experienced world and the correction of erroneous ones, whilst it seeks to construct an accurate systematic and rational interpretation of existence as a whole. This is good in its own place because we shall be all the better and not worse for finding a metaphysical base for our beliefs.

It is quite clear however that metaphysical systems cannot alone suffice for our higher purpose, for being based on personal assumptions, reasoning, or imaginations, if they partially enlighten mankind they also partially bewilder by their mutual contradictions. Hence philosophy steps in here and offers what it calls "the metaphysics of truth."

This is an interpretation in intellectual terms of the results obtained from a direct mystical insight concerned with what is itself incapable of intellectual seizure. Through this superior insight it provides in orderly shape the reasons, laws, and conditions of the supersensuous experience of the Overself, unifies and explains the experiences which lead up to this consummation, and finally brings the whole into relation with the practical everyday life of mankind.

It is the sole system that the antique sages intellectually built up after they had actually realized the Overself within their own experience. Such a point needs the utmost emphasis for it separates the system from all others which carry the name of metaphysics or philosophy. Whereas these others are but intelligent guesses or fragmentary anticipations of what ultimate truth or ultimate reality may be and hence hesitant between numerous "ifs" and "buts," this alone is a presentation from firsthand knowledge of what they really are. It bars out all speculation.

Whether it is ever possible to put into words that will not be idle ones truths of our real being has been a question whose answers are well argued for and against.

But whatever the judgement may be, who can doubt that similes, metaphors--that is, symbols--may be offered, suggestive hints given forth, and clues left behind by those whose knowledge and experience carries authority.

And these, too, are only words.

Those who say that, in this matter, human language is suspect, completely untrustworthy, and utterly helpless, that its use here can only set up false images and fresh illusions, are going too far.

It is to condemn us to hopelessness.

And it does not explain why Lao Tzu, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, John of the Cross, and Ramana Maharshi spoke or wrote despite their avowals.

Of course their communication is all a matter of reference to levels.

On the ordinary practical level--the immediate one--expression through any art, be it music, painting, drama, or literature, is not futile and does give something, does affect its audience.

If it be given by an enlightened man to those still groping in darkness or dusk, it has its place and is justified.

But on the ultimate level, with the mind absorbed in the Void, what is there to say?

And to whom could it be said?

Silence then becomes the correct attitude.

When humanity attains this level, the descent of divine teachers and their words will not be needed.

The metaphysics of truth is set out in such a way that the student believes he is proceeding step by step purely by logical deduction from ascertainable facts, that his reasoned thinking upholds the findings of transcendental experience, whereas not only is he doing this but at the same time is proceeding upon a path which conforms to his own latent insight.

It kindles a higher intelligence in its students.

Consequently the sense either of sudden or of growing revelation may often accompany his studies, if he be sufficiently intuitive.

The authentic metaphysics of truth can bring him close to the mystical experience of reality.

Then the trigger-pull which will start the experience moving need only be something slight, perhaps a printed inspired sentence, perhaps just a single meeting with one who has learnt to live in the Overself, or perhaps a climb in the mountains.

For then the mind becomes like a heap of dry wood, needing only a spark to flare up into a blazing pile. The close attention to its course of thought then becomes a yoga-path in itself.

"If it were just a matter of playing football with the firmament, stirring up the ocean, turning back rivers, carrying away mountains, seizing the moon, moving the Pole-star or shifting a planet, I could manage it easily enough.

Even if it were a question of my head being cut off or my belly being ripped open and my heart cut out or any kind of transference or transformation, I would take on the job at once,' said Monkey.

'But if it comes to sitting still and meditating, I am bound to come off badly. It's quite against my nature.'"

"The ego is monkey catapulting through the jungle:
Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses,
it swings from one desire to another,
one conflict to the next,
one self-centered idea to the next.
If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life.

Let this monkey go.
Let the senses go.
Let the desires go.
Let conflicts go.
Let ideas go.
Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the center, watching.

(a) Spinoza taught that God was the whole of things in the universe. This brought him into the category of pantheism. Philosophy says this is true but only part of the truth. For God is not only immanent in the universe but also transcends it. God still would be God even if there were no universe.

(b) He declared that the unknown reality was Substance. Philosophy says this is only an attribute of Reality and as such still not the ultimate itself, any more than the quality of fragrance is the flower itself.

(c) He believed in Causality, as science did in the nineteenth century, and as all must do who do not comprehend the final truth that Reality is nondual, hence leaves no room for the duality of cause and an effect.

Spinoza's pantheism made him declare that everything is God. This is the theological outlook. The philosophical one declares that everything is a manifestation of One Infinite Reality. For if the ego also is God, then who is God?

(d) Spinoza's teaching that God has two attributes, Mind and Matter, that reality has two aspects--mind and body, made him a dualist. Philosophy knows only one reality--Mind. It admits causality only for the immediate and practical purposes of the illusory world.

(e) His teaching on how to live so as to fulfil the proper purpose of life is identical with philosophy's teaching. He saw that man so far must become wholly free inwardly, and as free as possible outwardly. This is to be achieved by self-mastery, by overcoming desires, subjugating passions, and simplifying existence. This brings true happiness.

The difference is whether rigpa is projecting a secondary consciousness that is a micro-second too slow to witness the momentary projections AS they are being projected, and therefore is "seeing" them as though they are already there and pre-existing.

Otherwise rigpa is "seeing" it's projections as its own immediate creativity; and they release upon the arising.

Suddenly seeing that rigpa is itself projecting the "time lagged" secondary consciousness, is its immediate release.

“In one sense, enlightenment is realizing that there is no separate self.

We might hear that a hundred thousand times, "There is no separate self." But what happens when we take it inside and seriously consider what it could mean?

We would find it means that everything I as a separate self holds as true isn't. The taste of no separate self is totally liberating.

"No separate self" does not mean there is a spiritual experience that goes something like, "I have extended myself infinitely everywhere, and have merged with everything." That's a beautiful, wonderful experience for a separate self to have, but that's not what Oneness is.

Oneness is not merging. Merging happens between two and since there is only one, then any experience of merging is one illusion merging with another, as beautiful and wonderful as that experience may be.

Even when I experience having merged with the absolute, with the infinite, with God, it simply means that my fictitious self has merged with another fiction. Mystical experiences aren't enlightenment.”

In contemplating deeply Nature's beauty around one, as some of us have done, it is possible to slip into a stillness where we realize that there never was a past but always the NOW--the ever-present timeless Consciousness--all peace, all harmony; that there is no past--just the eternal.

Where are the shadows of negativity then?

They are non-existent!

This can happen if we forget the self, with its narrowed viewpoint, and surrender to the impersonal.

Since all phenomena and ideas are equally empty of inherent existence, no "other" existence is findable.

Pema Rigtsal:

"No matter what arises in samsara and nirvana, at the very moment of its appearing, it arises in ultimate timeless emptiness. There is not an iota of good to be cultivated or bad to be rejected. This is called “great timeless inseparable truth.” Empty when appearing, appearing when empty, this magnificent timeless sameness of emptiness and appearance is called “the view of Dzogchen” and also “the view of the ultimate sacrifice” or “the view free of all propositions.” In reality, therefore, all phenomena are merely mental labels, and in reality not even the smallest thing exists to be cultivated or rejected."

Imagine a single tower of all windows and a single Consciousness in the middle of the tower is looking out of all the windows at the same time.

But at each window frame it seems the window frame is what is conscious and looking out. The illusion is at the individual window frame but the window frame is itself not the consciousness "looking" through it.

That's "our" situation.

There is only one Consciousness (Dharmakaya) looking out of all of our eyes.

Yes, there comes a time when the deliberate purposeful search for the Overself has to be abandoned for this reason.

Paradoxically, it is given up many times, whenever he has a Glimpse, for at such moments he knows that he always was, is, and will be the Real, that there is nothing new to be gained or searched for.

Who should search for what?

But the fact remains that past tendencies of thought rise up after every Glimpse and overpower the mind, causing it to lose this insight and putting it back on the quest again.

While this happens he must continue the search, with this difference, that he no longer searches blindly, as in earlier days, believing that he is an ego trying to transform itself into the Overself, trying to reach a new attainment in time by evolutionary stages.

No! through the understanding of the Short Path he searches knowingly, not wanting another experience since both wanting and experiencing put him out of the essential Self.

He thinks and acts as if he is that Self, which puts him back into It. It is a liberation from time-bound thinking, a realization of timeless fact.

First you realize the place that you're in right now,
whether you think it’s good or bad,
whether you think you're happy or sad,
whether you think you're rich, or poor, or sick, or healthy,
the place where you're in right now is your right place.
That's the beginning.

You stop trying to be someone else.
You stop trying to change your life.
You're in your right place, right now, just the way you are.
If you can become happy and peaceful in the place
where you are right now,
all of a sudden you will find circumstances will change in your favor,
and then again you will be in your right place.

Whatever change comes along as far as your body-mind is concerned,
you are in your right place.
The more you can see that, the more you can look
at what I just said intellectually, intelligently,
the more peaceful you become,
the more the karmic patterns begin to break away
and you begin to awaken.

It may be gradual at first.
You notice that things that used to annoy you, no longer annoy you.
You notice that people that you live with, the conflicts you've had,
they stop because you've stopped.
There's no more trying to get even.
There's no more trying to win your point.
There's no more trying to find the right book,
or the right teacher, or the right anything.
You remain centered.
You remain free.

"When the awakening is very deep, we no longer operate from a place of personal self. In other words, everything doesn’t relate to “me.” Thoughts don’t relate to me; feelings don’t relate to me; what others do doesn’t relate to me; and what happens in the world doesn’t relate to me. In the egoic state of consciousness, literally every single thing that ever happens is happening to a me. Right?

That’s the “normal” state of consciousness. Nobody can really explain what the personal self is; we just feel it. It’s a visceral thing. It’s not just how we act and what we say; it’s our central fixation of self.

As we see through it, we realize that the personal self is not who we are and that it was not ever anything substantial to begin with. And as we really see into our true nature, there is a paradox that arises: the more we realize that there isn’t a self, the more intimately present we actually are."